# It has long been reported that "PS3 won't come with complete PlayStation 2 or PlayStation processors bundled inside" and that playing PS1/2 games would be handled through emulation.

# A new report has emerged contradicting the earlier statements by Sony Computer Entertainment's president Ken Kutaragi.

This new report states that every consumer that buys a PS3 will also be buying a PS2.

Quote:

PS3 hardware, in its current form, includes the core PlayStation 2 chipset. This presumably means that initial PS3 units will include the single Emotion Engine (the PS2 CPU) and Graphic Synthesizer (the PS2 graphics chip) combo chip that powers the slim model PS2.

# Of course, including the extra hardware drives up costs. The magazine adds that Sony plans on removing the PS2 chipset from future revisions of the PS3 hardware once it has finished development of a proper software-based PS2 emulator. Such a removal would help bring down costs for the system.

# Sony sounds like they are having problems reliably emulating the PS1/2 system on the PS3. Is this inclusion of a PS2 inside every PS3 part of the reason the system costs so much?

Ragnax

06-05-2006, 03:36 PM

Can't say I'm surprised.

With all the ways the devs had to man-handle the PS2 hardware to get it to do what they wanted, while not getting proper support from Sony itself, it would hardly be surprising for a lot of devs to have ended up with a working solution that doesn't work 'by the book'. (Going by that analogy; That would be Sony's exclusive book which said devs never got to read, even when they asked to 'borrow it'.)

And now it's going to come back and bite Sony in the ass when it comes to retaining backwards compatibility. The only practical way to get it working is to put a real PS2 in there. With identical hardware, you can be 99% sure things will 'work as they should'. Even then, you can still end up with problematic titles though. The PS2 carries a copy of the PS1 hardware in it, but it still has trouble running a few very specific PS1 games, which rely on loopy hardware dependencies, like memory timing and such.

I'm betting that right now, Sony is wishing it would have paid the extra money to see to it that proper SDKs were shipped to its developers.

Raziell

06-05-2006, 03:40 PM

Just another pathetic excuse to make it seem like the PS3's price is by all means nothing short of a bargain.